


Firestarter

by wednesday



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-25 01:25:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10753860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wednesday/pseuds/wednesday
Summary: Worst of all, it wastoo green. Rey had never imagined she’d ever get sick of green things.





	Firestarter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambiguously](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/gifts).



The jungle was melting hot, humid enough to swim in and full of sticky, thorny obstacles. Worst of all, it was _too green_. Rey had never imagined she’d ever get sick of green things. It had seemed beautiful when she landed on Javin 4 and kept being the most amazing thing up until five hours ago, when her speeder had died a two hours ride from the small spaceport.

Jakku had had a small spaceport, but the one on Javin 4 gave new meaning to the words small and run down, which was a surprise. For some reason Rey had expected Javin 4 to be well settled, especially with all the water on it, but apparently it wasn’t on this side of the moon. After a five-hour trek through the jungle Rey understood why. Her clothes were catching on the plants every step, the ground was unevenly covered in roots, spots of rocks and suspiciously soft moss that tried to swallow her feet.

It couldn’t be helped, though, so she just kept going in the direction her holo-nav told her was back to the port. She had considered continuing on towards her initial goal – the strange transmission encrypted with what master Luke said were old Jedi codes. Holo-nav estimated that to be 50 walking hours further, though. The port she at least had the chance to reach sometime during the night or early morning, if she kept on walking, get a better transport, figure out some kind of plan.

To be honest, everything looked exactly the same by now, and it felt like she’d been walking in circles. Every time she checked her nav device, it turned out she’d turned away from the right direction, and it was too hot to _think_ , never mind concentrate on the force to help find her way back.

After some rustling soft rain began to filter down from the tree branches and leaves. It only cooled Rey down a little, though at least it didn’t make anything worse – Rey had been soaked through with sweat and air moisture even before her speeder broke down. Broke down form too much air moisture in the oxidation vents; it wasn’t the kind of problem Rey knew how to fix, because she’d never imagined too much water being an issue.

For the last hour or so she had the increasingly skin crawling sensation of being watched by someone from the cover of the surrounding trees. She hadn’t seen any signs of life at all, not even any animals. It was probably just the lack of sunlight getting to her.

She checked the holo-nav again and. It was pointing back where she just came from. She’d barely walked a dozen steps since last check, there was no way she could have gotten turned around so fast.

Kriff, was this jungle full of magnetic interference? Radioactive soil? She hadn’t even considered that.

Rey cursed and kicked a tree root and tried to calm down enough to think.

Okay, nav device was useless, but she could still try to use the force to sense the right direction, the closest sentients, something.

It took a while, but she managed to let go of all the physical discomfort and concentrate on feeling the force around her. It wasn’t easy and it felt viscous and slow moving as molasses. Rey wasn’t an expert at the force thing, okay, but she was definitely improving fast. Reaching out was still harder than she expected.

Some minutes later she found a _something_ not that far away. Live something, that felt like people, but not how she was used to them feeling. Some sentient species she hadn’t met before maybe? Or maybe the weirdness of the jungle was influencing all the force here.

On the other hand, she had come to Javin expecting to find some old alien Jedi, so maybe a village of aliens in the jungle?

Rey got up slowly from the damp ground and started walking in the direction the force was guiding her.

Another half an hour’s trek through the slowly cooling green and Rey actually started to see some signs of habitation – remains of an old building, a pile of scraps that might have been a speeder once, strangely regular piles of rocks. All of it was old, though, and looked too overgrown for anyone to be living there.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Rey,” said a familiar voice.

Rey turned around so fast she almost fell down, steadied herself the last moment.

There less than a couple dozen feet from her was Kylo Ren, without his helmet, yet still too intimidating. The faint red scar running across his face gave Rey a lot of the courage keeping her from running away.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he repeated before Rey could come up with anything to say, and took a couple of steps closer.

“Did you make the transmission?” He’d probably hoped to lure master Luke here, but instead she’d come. As if this day couldn’t get any worse.

Rey tried to look around inconspicuously; there were no troopers or anyone else around that she could see. She hadn’t noticed Ren either, so that wasn’t saying much. It was very quiet, though. If she could find Ren’s transport, she might--

Ren laughed, and it sounded hollow somehow. It sounded like a no. “Rey,” he said insistently and stepped closer, “Rey, listen, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Who sent it? What did you do to them?” she asked. If he’d followed the same trace and found another Jedi, found them first. Rey so wished she’d been faster. “I felt people here in the force. Where are they?”

“You have no idea about the force here,” he said, suddenly harsh and shadows seemed to grow deeper around him. That was more like what she expected of Kylo Ren and it made Rey feel less weird and unsettled about the whole conversation. “What did you expect to find in a Sith temple? On a planet full of dead Sith?”

“Sith- What?” Rey felt stunned for a moment too long, Ren took another couple of steps and grabbed her wrist just as she was reaching for her lightsaber. Close up his face was too pale and his eyes too dark, and the uneasy feeling came back stronger than before.

She only tried to struggle a little, because by physical force alone it was useless, and she didn’t want to show any weakness by losing that kind of fight.

“Let go of me!”

“I can’t,” he replied nonsensically and Rey noticed small red leaves stuck to his cloak and gloves. “Rey, I can’t let you go,” he continued, and he looked feverish.

She’d seen those leaves before – around where her speeder stopped working. She’d found them pretty and nice smelling and reached to touch and the force had slammed her with a warning so strong she’d felt it like a physical hit.

Meanwhile Ren was staring at her face desperately, like he needed her to understand something. It was. It was wrong, this was not the kind of situations she’d ever expected from a run in with him.

Rey could feel the nice scent of the leaves again, and the force wasn’t warning her about anything anymore, and Ren was so close. She hadn’t ever noticed how good he looked. No, that was a lie, she’d noticed, but it had seemed just an added cruelty, for someone so handsome to also be so evil, even if she’d learned a long time ago that it sometimes worked that way.

He wasn’t doing anything bad right now, though, he was just holding on to Rey’s hand and looking down at her. Rey reached up carefully and touched the side of his face. His skin was cool and. There, so, so close.

“It’s the leaves, isn’t it?” she asked and leaned closer, the question almost a whisper.

Ren nodded faintly and, in case she hadn’t understood before, said “Rey, I can’t let go.”

She felt like nothing was more important at that moment than Ren and being close to him. How could he _stand_ this, why was he just looking at her, not doing anything? Rey pushed at his chest as hard as she could and Ren stumbled sideways. For a moment he looked- relieved? Rey followed him as he stopped with his back against a tree and pressed her face against his neck and inhaled his scent, mixed so well with the scent of the red leaves.

“ _Rey_ ,” he said urgently, “what are you _doing_?” He sounded so outraged for a moment that Rey almost started laughing, but then he contradicted himself right away. He put his hands, so huge, on her upper arms and moved her, turned them around so that Rey’s back was against the tree, and kissed her. The kiss was about as urgent as his objection just moments ago and Rey responded in kind.

Finally, it felt like the hours of walking, stumbling through the jungle and the boring flight to the planet and everything else before this, it was all worth it.

Rey kissed back, bit Ren’s lip lightly and moved her leg up, hitched it against his hip. He pressed closer against her and everything was brilliant, just, they needed to lose some clothes, Rey definitely did, they were damp and distracting and in the way.

She tried to reach into his clothes, get all of his black layers off. Ren was running his hands up and down her sides, touching her breasts through her wet clothes at the same time, though, and Rey loved it, kept pressing into it, but they both kept getting in each others way. Nothing got done this way, no clothes removed, and she had to change it.

Rey leaned back against the tree and jumped up, wrapped both her legs around Ren’s waist and with another push against the tree tipped them both over. Ren landed on his back in the mossy ground and Rey ended up straddling him. She leaned down to continue kissing, pressed her lips against his and-

He didn’t kiss back.

It maybe took her a little while to notice, but she did notice and leaned back to ask what was wrong. Except Ren wouldn’t have answered anyway – he was unconscious.

“No,” Rey whispered and tried to shake him awake. It didn’t work at all, “No! You can’t just do this to me! Wake up!”

Her efforts and anger were both useless, and Ren stayed out cold on the ground.

Rey did keep trying to wake him with increasingly strong shaking and insults. It took her some time to calm down enough to think about doing something else. She checked and found a harder patch of ground, a rock maybe, under his head and a matching lump on his head. It didn’t seem life threatening, but obviously he wasn’t getting up anytime soon.

Reluctantly she got up from straddling him and suddenly the previously suffocating air felt too cold.

It took another few minutes to find Ren’s transport, a newer and bigger speeder than the one she’d lost. In the time it took Rey to bring it around, he hadn’t moved at all, so she just sighed unhappily and with considerable effort moved him up on the speeder. The navigation on it had a log of the last route and Rey set it to guide her back the same way.

It was probably at least an hour’s ride back to the spaceport; Rey could figure out what to do further when she got there. Rent a room at the cantina? Get a med scanner?

If he didn’t wake up on the way, anyway; Rey was sure he’d have a possibly violent opinion about being knocked unconscious.

They had unfinished business either way.

When the speeder reached a respectable speed, Rey picked up Ren’s masked helmet from it’s place on the floor, threw it as hard as she could out of the transport and watched in as it very satisfactorily smashed against a tree.

  
  



End file.
